It completely floors me how many people have NO understanding of health insurance.

Listen, here’s the skinny, and some important points to remember…

1. When you pay your insurance premium, you are not paying for YOUR healthcare. You are paying, with a bunch of other people, for a policy that covers ALL of you. For whatever. When you need it, it’s there. When you don’t, you don’t get a refund.

2. It is absolutely stupid to believe that, by paying your insurance premium, you should only be paying for what you and your family want to use. If you honestly feel that way, drop your insurance, open a savings account and put the money there. We’ll see how well that works when you rack up a million dollar medical bill.

3. If you are pro-life, and don’t want to pay for maternity care, I can have a chat with you how babies are made, and all of the things that can go wrong between the sexy fun time and the actual birth of the baby. In other words, if you don’t think maternity care is an essential benefit that every woman should affordably have, then you are not pro-life. Sorry.

4. Medical coverage, like medical care, should not be based on what kind of care anyone “deserves”. If you go skiing and break your leg, or fall off a ladder cleaning your own gutters, or get poison ivy when you go camping, or stab yourself with a knife in the kitchen, or somehow manage any other of the insane mishaps that can befall us simply because we are human beings, I don’t get to call meeting with my employer and co-workers where we decide if you get covered or if you were just too stupid to deserve it. You didn’t ASK for it–and if a person implies that you did, they are wrong. So are you, if you somehow think anyone ASKED to become ill or injured.

5. “Lifestyle diseases” are fewer than you might think, and are almost always complicated by factors over which you have no control. Non-smokers get lung cancer. People with healthy diets get diabetes. Jim Fixx dies of a heart attack. Children get HIV. People who have done nothing more horrible than take the medication their doctors prescribed become opioid addicts. YOU don’t get to decide who has and who has not contributed to their disease, and who is or is not worthy of care. Mind your own business, or someone may be standing over YOU pronouncing judgement on the value of YOUR life.